PKM

Organization of personal information is not knowledge work in my opinion and a focus on the individual does not leverage the basic strength of KM which is networking, collaborative spaces and group innovation / knowledge creation.

In many ways, my unease with PKM parallels my thoughts on the paradigms that focus on individual competencies rather than social learning. For me, the greatest leverage and largest promise in knowledge work comes from the social aspects. I find this to be a fundamental distinction and thus often see myself at odds with the PKM camp on many fronts. Let's examine some common PKM principles:

Focus on self-organization:
Organise your thoughts, gather & catalog your knowledge assets, cluster and categorize your sources, document your network, track your activities. The claim is knowledge creation starts with individual competencies. The focus is on fast and effective access to information.

No quibble that you need to capture & organize things but should this be the key focus of your knowledge activities?

The individual as the key engine for knowledge work:
Focus inwards, you can no longer depend on others (community, company, professional group) for your learning, security or long term future. The road ahead requires you to look out for yourself, build your competencies, guard your IP, brand your IC and continually market your skills. You need to take personal responsibility for your future. I wonder!

Knowledge acquisition and learning need social connections. getting ahead today means having a 'mother' community to test your insights, a group to share and learn distinctions, an intellectual guild to filter news and increase your awareness and a network to increase connections and gather ideas.

I'm thinking the important issues in a PKM are:
* The communities you belong to, your reciprocity & empathy
* The networked relationships you have along which knowledge can flow
* Your openness to new ideas, your willingness to alter your mental models and your ability to really listen

Here is how I see things:

The most valuable knowledge related asset any individual has, is their relationships for it is those relationships that determine knowledge flow, exposure and awareness to new ideas, potential for collaboration, social capital and trust.

Personal identity comes next. Without a positive feeling of self-worth, an empathy for others and a willingness to learn any individual will have a hard time with knowledge related work. An audit needs to observe and validate those unarticulated assumptions about self.

Technological competencies, application suites, familiarity with equipment, diversity of formats and communication mediums are not the key to knowledge flows, they determine the easiest and quickest way to communicate, but give no picture of personal motivation, make no or little statement about past experiences, do not attest to the individuals ability to deal with complex and abstract concepts, their need for learning nor do they tell us much about their interests, tacit knowledge or desires (motivators).

During a PKM audit, it is key to find touch points, common interests, shared values, learning gaps and to determine their group skills and collaborative work preferences. We need to surface their assumptions, appreciate their mental models and understand their views about knowledge itself.

The key deliverable from a PKM audit is an assessment of the persons tacit knowledge levels.

So

PKM to me is a paradox - knowledge in my world is socially constructed - it is not about organizing your thoughts, learning to use tools or developing individual competencies - it is about dialog, community and collaboration.

Now your thoughts?

Comments

[Ian]

Tool will change everything! Now a tool aimed at PIM or PKM will provide the feature of sharing or exchanging too. To me, PKM tool will help people to learn how to organize/ categorize valuable information, sometimes this procedure is much important than just joining a KM group and contribute/post information to a category tree setup by others.

A seriously intergration of PIM and SIM (search information management)is a basic for PKM. And in the future, more functions on absorbing and exporting information from/to different file formats and internet community tools will eliminate the paradox BTW PKM and KM. Please try my software "ES Power Keeper" to experience my ideas. (http://www.richskills.com/products/1/)

[Sue Peekna]

I agree, Denham, that personal information management is not personal knowledge management - but that doesn't mean that you don't benefit by managing/organizing your personal information.

Those of us with memories like sieves need some kind of "tool" to help us remember all the little tidbits of "facts" that we run into every day - the "post-it note" phenomena, if you will.

Your argument that social constructs are far more valuable in acquiring and transmitting information - which becomes knowledge only when it's in your brain & you can understand it well enough to choose to act on it, or not - is of course valid. My problem is remembering what people said!

So a "personal information manager" to me is just that - support for organizing information, it is NOT a personal knowledge manager! I also believe that products like MS OUtlook, while a nice tool for addresses, schedules, & tasks, is not very good at helping me remember tidbits that may - or may not-be related to other tidbits. For that you need something like (my favorite of all time) Lotus Agenda. Zoot is pretty good too - and it doesn't do addresses, email, or calender support (well, you can sort of make it work with Outlook, but that's not the main intent).

What Agenda and Zoot do is to let you enter random thoughts and clipping from documents and internet sites, applying "0rganization" rules either before or after the fact - and to change those rules on the fly without losing all the tidbits. I use them for meeting notes, references, web site stuff, and all kinds of things. Changing the categories, rules, search terms as I think of something I want to research. I've been doing that with Agenda for over 10 years, and it's the only way I can track quickly what I learned about the myriad of projects I've been involved with.

Example: from 1997 to 1999 I was involved in a data warehouse project that took data from SAP (the ERP system) and put it on a database for user querying. I entered all kinds of stuff in Agenda about what the SAP info was, where it was, & what it meant. This year, I got a job with a manufacturing company that also uses SAP, and I needed to know something about SAP data. Out came the little Agenda database, and within minutes, I found a whole bunch of stuff I needed to know but had forgotten - along with the people whom I worked with, their phone numbers, meeting notes I had with them, issues, etc....

Of course it's not knowledge. The knowledge is in my head. But my head isn't so good at remembering where all the little thoughts are stored and quickly recalling them - so Zoot & Agenda help me.

[David Locke]

I would argue with PKM as that it only reaches the explicit knowledge. I argue all the aspects of KM that only reach explict knowledge.

But, I wouldn't dismiss PKM provided that interoperativity comes with the package. Then, the deal is documenting difference, because every individual comes to a company as a culture of one. Social construction is a filter on getting the person into the company in the first place. Social construction is then all the acts integrating the individual into the company. And, social construction keeps the person in the company.

Capturing your self and your growth is important, because employees are liquid. They come here from some other place, some other cultures, and they will invariably go some other place taking some aspects of the currant company's culture with them.

Social construction can be a barrier to participation and not just some nice thing that happens all the time. The individual still has to develop their own IP and IC and brand whether they get to participate in the social construction or not.